Doing turkey-in-the-hole with Gary officiating.


1. Take three turkeys and slather them in margarine and seasonings. Make sure there’s at least one health fanatic around to throw conniptions. This causes endless entertainment to the normal people gathered about.

2. Snap lots of photos with the perpetrators in various poses appropriate for the occasion.

3. Pack with ice and wrap (do not rap) turkeys in 14 layers of foil. This layer number has been refined over many years of trial and error by the head turkey-in-the-holer.

4. Rig up a wiring system around carcass so as to easily hook it and thereby extract from the fire at the appropriate time.

5. Build fire on green logs centred (we’re in Canada) over hole. Have logs collapse in hole prematurely. Use old garage door tracks instead. The idea is to have hot coals fall down in hole, then at the right time, bury turkeys in these coals.

6. “Sleep” on foam and blanket by the fire all night. Of course, we use the term “sleep” as liberally as possible.

7. Stoke fire often because it’s birch firewood, not oak.

8. Remove from hole 8 hrs. later. Very tasty. One was marinated, and I think the others were injected with marination.

It was a pretty good feast for a bunch of Canadians celebrating US Thanksgiving: turkey, dressing, baked corn, jello, sweet potato soufflé, pumpkin pie, and homemade ice cream. Kevin and Albert made the pies. And nobody perished from food poisoning. We cranked the ice cream maker by hand, but unfortunately the gears were wearing down. They kept catching, and actually left a not-so-pleasing film of metal shaving dust on the lid. This had a way of working its way into the ice cream itself. Even though we scooped some of it out, we did wonder why the ice cream was darker than normal. Just kidding. Again, there were no casualties from the ingestion of the contents, for which we are grateful.